Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture by Akane Kanai

Author:Akane Kanai
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783319915159
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Singular Best Friend as Pleasing Mirror

The figure of the female best friend features across the blogs, sometimes named as the ‘roommate’ or ‘bestie’, and always signifying significant affective investment. However, the best friend features most centrally as an almost-romantic, cherished figure in the moments recounted in the founder blog. Indeed, as noted in the introduction to this book, the founder blog was initially envisaged as a dialogue between two ‘best friends ’, two young women, in different law schools in the United States. This in part explains the context of production and the personal voice which comes through the posts—one in which a high level of interpersonal knowledge is assumed for the deciphering and immediate recognition of posts, and one in which the decoding process in itself is a form of pleasurable play.

Alison Winch (2013), as I have previously noted, provides a compelling analysis of how the best girlfriend finds a recurring and privileged presence in feminine popular culture. The girlfriend features across reality television, sitcoms, movies, and advertising, addressing the reader as belonging to a shared, feminine world. Given this shared experience, the girlfriend speaks with an intimate knowing voice in relation to the trials of feminine life, as reflected in authoritative ‘best friend ’ accounts on how to live as a woman in self-help and lifestyle genres of media. Winch notes the girlfriend’s attributed ability to understand deeply feminine problems corresponds with the ‘girlfriend gaze’: a form of intimate, intensified surveillance that assists in perfecting the self as a brand-able subject. The best girlfriend has an important function as a useful, emotional, and surveilling accessory to a young woman’s entrepreneurial life project; as such, I suggest, she synthesises postfeminist luminous demands on the self in a way that is fun, caring and intimate. Often, the (best) girlfriend’s importance for a young woman’s wellbeing through her ability to understand uniquely feminine issues is emphasised over and above the companionship of men. While ‘[g]irlfriend culture does not rely on the hope generated through a heterosexual “happy ever after”’ (Winch 2013, 4), the emphasis on the special position of the girlfriends occurs precisely through the depiction of girlfriendship as resolutely heterosexual. Girlfriend culture thus offers a sense of freedom, but on terms that support feminine normativity, in a neoliberal context where any reliance on others is severely regulated.

The way in which best girlfriendship is taken up in the blogs unevenly reflects the normative emphasis that Winch identifies in popular culture. While the best friend does not appear to be centrally implicated in the disciplinary gaze that Winch discusses, moments enjoyed with the best friend tend to involve activities that serve as a heuristic for feminine fun in girlfriend media culture. The follower blogs usually cite the best friend via experiences such as shopping excursions to clothing store J-Crew (TwoDumbGirls) or in celebratory cocktails (2ndhandembarrassment). As such, she is often cursorily invoked in situations that sometimes appear indistinguishable from broader Sex and the City (Star 1998) type narratives where girlfriendship is synonymous with feminine consumption.

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